To the Editor:

My father, R. Alton Pitcher, deceased, grew up on a dairy farm in East Berne. The 163-acre family farm is located in the scenic Cole Hill valley, including a large home that still exists today beside the Fox Creek bridge.

He left the farm, obtained a business diploma, and then spent a number of years managing chain stores in the Northeast. With the death of his parents, the farm was sold. Alton married and had two children with his wife, Marion, while working in Massachusetts.

Then the old farm came back up for sale in 1947 and Alton decided the old farm would provide a nice home for his own growing family and he bought it back. I, his son, Rudolph A Pitcher Jr., was 9 years old when we arrived on the farm, our new home.

The farm had not been significantly updated since he had left. The house still did not have central heating, but a large black wood stove in the family room instead, which provided needed heating. It also warmed the upstairs through registers cut in the floor.

The kitchen stove was kerosene-heated for cooking and was fueled from a large tank behind the house. There was no inside plumbing save for pitcher pumps at the sinks that drew water collected in a cistern in the cellar that stored the rain from the roof.

Family baths were done with stove-heated water in a porcelain tub near the sink. Drinking water was pumped from a well outside and kept in a pail on the sink with a dipper everyone shared, including visitors. A two-hole toilet behind the house served those needs.

Most of the family food was raised on the farm and preserved by canning and butchering. The many shelves of Mason jars with vegetables from the large garden were stored on wood shelves hanging from the cellar ceiling.

Two hogs were raised each year and butchered each fall. Some of the pork was also canned with the lard to preserve it. Ham and bacon were cured in large crocks of salt and water weighted down with clean rocks. And were then smoked in the old smokehouse behind the house with a small stove and dried hickory wood.

Chickens were raised and butchered as needed. The cool cellar also contained two built-in large bins to store apples grown on the many old apple trees on the farm and for potatoes grown in the garden. Much of the butchered pork was stored in a frozen food locker business in Greenville.

The farm came with a team of white Percheron draft horses, named Prince and Maude. We harnessed and drove the team mowing hayfields and pastures, raking hay into windrows when dry, and hauling a hay wagon.

An old slat-and-rope hay loader hooked behind the hay wagon lifted the hay up and into the wagon.  My father and I spent many hot, long and tiring days working in the hayfields each summer.

The horses were usually sweating profusely from their heavy pulling and were often bleeding along their sides from multiple horsefly bites accrued while in harness. Prince and Maude had a habit of stopping beneath any available field perimeter apple tree during the fall. They each expected a fallen apple before pulling any further.

Many other days of summer were spent repairing fences, malleting in new fence posts, and stringing barbed wire around the pasture fields and, of course, milking cows. We had about 16 milk cows on the farm and they had to be milked at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. each and every day. This task, even with milking machines, took about four hours of each day.

The farm also came with an old Farmall F-12 tractor with steel wheels. It was used to pull the forked hay from the wagon in the barn and up onto a greased wooden track along the roof main beam that moved the hay over to the mow and then dropped it when triggered by a rope attached to the barn’s hay fork. And, of course, at the end of the day, the hay brought in that day had to be distributed evenly in the mow by hand with a pitchfork and salted.

The Farmall F-12 tractor was also used for plowing and tilling fields in the spring and pulling the manure spreader out to the fields in the winter. The crank-started Farmall F-12 was an accident waiting to happen when hand-cranking to start and stepping over the turning belt-drive wheel and PTO connection with loose pant legs when mounting into the driver’s seat.

When fall came, so did the season for harvesting grain that had been sown to feed the livestock, along with the hay from the mow, the following winter. A neighbor with a combine was hired to cut the crop and bag the ripe wheat.

The bags of wheat were then transported from the field to the two-story granary building near the barn. Each burlap bag of wheat, containing a 100 pounds or more, had to be hand carried upstairs in the granary and dumped into built-in bins to further dry.

During the following year, the grain was gravity fed through wooden chutes back down into the burlap bags as needed. It was reloaded into a vehicle and driven to the GLF mill in Berne to be ground and molasses added for the milking cows and horses.

During the winters, much time was spent in the woods in the snow with a two-man cross-cut saw, cutting and splitting tree sections for firewood and fence posts. After working in the summer heat in the fields for months the oncoming winter was welcomed for the increased leisure time.

There were no TVs nor computers, but there were plenty of books, magazines, and the newspaper to read, and good radio shows for listening. I read the complete Hardy Boys series a couple of times over. The long, dark cold winters in the Helderbergs did encourage a reading habit that has been with me over the years.

With the passing of the years, modernization took place, both in the home and in the fields. My father, R. Alton Pitcher, died in 1975. He is now buried in a small family cemetery, known as the “Wilcox family” cemetery, on a ridge along the eastern wood line of his beloved valley farm.

I, Rudolph A. Pitcher Jr, graduated from Berne-Knox Central School in 1956, followed by the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University in 1960. The latter institution taught that dairy farming had a bleak future in New York state.

The draft, then active, encouraged me to complete the four-year ROTC program at Cornell to meet my service obligation. I chose an Army career while serving and didn’t return to the farm. And once again the farm was sold.

Rudolph A. Pitcher

Huntsville, Alabama